Official and business style of speech

Sometimes after reading the next contract there is an understanding of why it is customary to use specially trained people to work with them. This is due to the features of the formal business style of speech , making it difficult to understand. But this style of presentation has its advantages, otherwise it would have been abandoned long ago.

Signs of the official-business style of speech

Of course, for us the main pointers to the officiality of the document are the seal of the organization and the signature of the person in charge, but when it comes to the style of speech, very different signs come out on top.

1. Objectivity, informativeness and reliability.
2. Absence of words that can be interpreted in two ways.
3. Perfection of the construction of phrases and documents from a legal point of view.
4. Laconic formulations, the desire for maximum brevity, the use of complex sentences with frequent use of complex unions and verbal nouns.
5. Neutrality of presentation, lack of emotional coloring, preference for direct word order, almost complete disregard for the individualization of the style.
6. The use of speech cliches in the construction of phrases.
7. The use of standard phrases in case of describing typical situations.
8. Logical presentation, its narrative character.

All these features of the official-business style of speech make it the most closed and stable among all book styles. Time brings its changes in this language, but the main points - phraseological units, specific speech and syntactic phrases, remain unchanged. In other styles of speech, the use of stamps has long been considered a disadvantage, but in official conversations they are only welcome. Actually, this patterning of the text in combination with the lack of emotional coloring and a large number of enumerations, which are also a sign of official style, make the documents so difficult to read and perceive .

The purpose of formal-business style of speech

At first glance, all this linguistic stagnancy and conservatism are invented to emphasize the isolation of the business from other spheres of life. As a result, the average person gets a headache from trying to figure out all the intricacies, and is forced to pay money to specialists.

On the one hand, it's true, a number of specialists (document experts, lawyers, archivists) are partly translators from an official-business speech to a conversational, understandable to a large part of the population. But do not look for the tenacious paws of the world conspiracy, because, on the other hand, the official-business style of speech is designed to minimize the likelihood of errors and simplify the work with various kinds of documentation. In colloquial speech, we often use expressions with vivid emotional coloring, we love ambiguities, we often use argo and do not disdain irony. Can you imagine, for example, what the contract of supply written in colloquial language would look like? On the observance of delivery dates, liability for violation of the agreement and compliance of the delivered goods ordered could have been forgotten. That is, a special style of presentation for official papers is created to exclude the possibility of conjectures and various interpretations of information depending on the education of people working with them. And to speed up the work with documents of various kinds invented standards of compilation. Everything is regulated from the location of the requisites to the order of writing the address on the envelope. This allows you to quickly find the information you need without reviewing the entire document. For example, an accountant who pays for renting a room is only interested in the terms of payment, details and duration of the contract. A clear structure of the document allows you to quickly access this information, otherwise, the time for processing the contract would be greatly increased.